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Aerosols affect Earth's climate both directly and indirectly, which is the largest uncertainty in the assessment of radiative forcings affecting anthropogenic climate change. The standard Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) aerosol products have been widely used for more than 30 years. Currently, there is strong community interest in the possibility of determining aerosol composition directly from remote sensing observations. This work presents the results of applying such a recently developed approach by Li et al. to extended datasets of the directional sky radiances and spectral aerosol optical depth (AOD) measured by AERONET for the retrievals of aerosol components. First, the validation of aerosol optical properties retrieved by this component approach with AERONET standard products shows good agreement. Then, spatiotemporal variations of the obtained aerosol component concentration are characterized globally, especially the absorbing aerosol species (black carbon, brown carbon, and iron oxides) and scattering aerosol species (organic carbon, quartz, and inorganic salts). Finally, we compared the black carbon (BC) and dust column concentration retrievals to the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2), products in several regions of interest (Amazon zone, Indo-China Peninsula, North India, southern Africa, sub-Sahel, Gobi Desert, Middle East, Sahara Desert, and Taklamakan Desert) for new insights on the quantitative assessment of MERRA-2 aerosol composition products (R = 0.60-0.85 for BC; R = 0.75-0.90 for dust). The new value-added and long-term aerosol composition product globally is available online (https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.25415239.v1), which provides important measurements for the improvement and optimization of aerosol modeling to enhance estimation of the aerosol radiative forcing. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: In the assessment of climate change, the uncertainty associated with aerosol radiative forcing is the largest one. The purpose of this study is to provide a new value-added and long-term aerosol composition (including absorbing and scattering aerosol species) inversion dataset derived from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) measurements for characterizing their spatiotemporal variations at global scale. We find some new insights on the quantitative assessment of black carbon and dust column concentration products in the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2). Our results and aerosol composition inversion dataset will provide robust support for the overall improvement and optimization of aerosol modeling to better understand the aerosol radiative forcing. KEYWORDS: Algorithms; Remote sensing; Aerosol optical properties; Air pollution; Atmospheric composition, 1. Introduction Atmospheric aerosols are considered to be an important climate forcing factor that plays a key role in the global climate system (Charlson et al. 1992; IPCC 2021). For [...]

With the recent advancements in sensing technologies, mechatronics, and artificial intelligence, collaborative robots are deployed on construction sites to assist workers in performing physically demanding tasks. However, the human-robot collaboration (HRC) can bring several occupational challenges to workers, ranging from physical collisions to adverse psychological impacts. To date, most of the literature on HRC has focused on addressing physical safety challenges, while very few have considered the psychological safety of the workers. To bridge this gap, by integrating generative adversarial network, autoencoder, machine learning, and robot adaptation techniques, this study proposes a novel physiological computing system that enables the collaborative robot to efficiently perceive workers' psychological states and regulate its performance seamlessly. The results showed that the proposed system allowed the robot to adjust its performance as per workers' cognitive load level with 89.6% accuracy. The findings revealed the potential of the proposed system in facilitating safe HRC in construction. Key words: construction robots, human-robot collaboration, physiological computing, robotic perception, robotic manipulation, 1. Introduction Robots have garnered much attention as an effective means to relieve workers from repetitive and dangerous construction tasks. In this context, robotic systems are being deployed in construction [...]

New robotics technologies are being used for environmental research, and engineers and ecologists are exploring ways of integrating an array of different sorts of robots into ecosystems as a means of responding to the unprecedented environmental changes that mark the onset of the Anthropocene. These efforts introduce new roles that robots may play in our environments, potentially crucial new forms of human dependence on such robots, and new ways that robots can enhance life quality and environmental health. These efforts at once introduce a variety of new and unprecedented ethical concerns. This work uses a previously developed functional taxonomy of kinds of environmental robots to develop a list of key ethical questions to push forward the sub-field and study of Environmental Robot Ethics. By identifying unique concerns raised by the different sorts of existing environmental robotics technologies, this paper aims to provide resources for further critical analysis of the ethical issues and tradeoffs environmental robots present., Author(s): Justin Donhauser [sup.1], Aimee van Wynsberghe [sup.2], Alexander Bearden [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.253248.a, 0000 0001 0661 0035, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, , 305 Shatzel Hall, [...]

Ethics plays a key role in the normative analysis of the impacts of technology. We know that computers in general and the processing of data, the use of artificial intelligence, and the combination of computers and/or artificial intelligence with robotics are all associated with ethically relevant implications for individuals, groups, and society. In this article, we argue that while all technologies are ethically relevant, there is no need to create a separate 'ethics of X' or 'X ethics' for each and every subtype of technology or technological property-e.g. computer ethics, AI ethics, data ethics, information ethics, robot ethics, and machine ethics. Specific technologies might have specific impacts, but we argue that they are often sufficiently covered and understood through already established higher-level domains of ethics. Furthermore, the proliferation of tech ethics is problematic because (a) the conceptual boundaries between the subfields are not well-defined, (b) it leads to a duplication of effort and constant reinventing the wheel, and (c) there is danger that participants overlook or ignore more fundamental ethical insights and truths. The key to avoiding such outcomes lies in a taking the discipline of ethics seriously, and we consequently begin with a brief description of what ethics is, before presenting the main forms of technology related ethics. Through this process, we develop a hierarchy of technology ethics, which can be used by developers and engineers, researchers, or regulators who seek an understanding of the ethical implications of technology. We close by deducing two principles for positioning ethical analysis which will, in combination with the hierarchy, promote the leveraging of existing knowledge and help us to avoid an exaggerated proliferation of tech ethics., Author(s): Henrik Skaug Sætra [sup.1], John Danaher [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.446040.2, 0000 0001 1940 9648, Faculty of Computer Science, Engineering and Economics, Østfold University College, , 1757-N, Remmen, Norway [...]

Changes in gene regulation underlie much of phenotypic evolution.sup.1. However, our understanding of the potential for regulatory evolution is biased, because most evidence comes from either natural variation or limited experimental perturbations.sup.2. Using an automated robotics pipeline, we surveyed an unbiased mutation library for a developmental enhancer in Drosophila melanogaster. We found that almost all mutations altered gene expression and that parameters of gene expression--levels, location, and state--were convolved. The widespread pleiotropic effects of most mutations may constrain the evolvability of developmental enhancers. Consistent with these observations, comparisons of diverse Drosophila larvae revealed apparent biases in the phenotypes influenced by the enhancer. Developmental enhancers may encode a higher density of regulatory information than has been appreciated previously, imposing constraints on regulatory evolution. A robotic pipeline is used to survey a library of mutations in a Drosphila gene enhancer, showing that most mutations altered gene expression and had widespread pleiotropic effects that are likely to constrain regulatory evolution., Author(s): Timothy Fuqua [sup.1] [sup.2] , Jeff Jordan [sup.3] , Maria Elize van Breugel [sup.1] , Aliaksandr Halavatyi [sup.1] , Christian Tischer [sup.1] , Peter Polidoro [sup.3] , Namiko Abe [...]

We investigated the feasibility of our novel evaluation system for use with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We prepared the experimental setting with two humanoid robots in reference to the birthday party scene in the Autism Diagnostic Observational Schedule (ADOS). We assessed the relationship between social communication ability measured in the ADOS condition (i.e., with a human clinician) and in a robotic condition for children with ASD. There were significant correlations between the social communication scores in the gold-standard ADOS condition and the robotic condition for children with ASD. The current work provides support for a unique application of a robotic system (i.e., two robot-mediated interaction) to evaluate the severity of autistic traits for children with ASD., Author(s): Hirokazu Kumazaki [sup.1] , Taro Muramatsu [sup.2] , Yuichiro Yoshikawa [sup.3] , Yuko Yoshimura [sup.1] , Takashi Ikeda [sup.1] , Chiaki Hasegawa [sup.1] , Daisuke N. Saito [sup.1] , [...]